Horticultural Monuments

Jüdischer Friedhof Weißensee

Construction of the Friedhof Weißensee, the fourth Jewish cemetery in Berlin, began in 1878. The architect Hugo Licht was awarded first prize in a design competition for his plan of yellow brick cemetery buildings and gravesites divided into triangles, rectangles and trapezoids. The intersections of the tree-lined avenues bordering the main path form circles, squares and octagons. Immediately behind the entrance is a circular plot containing a memorial for the six million Jews murdered by the National Socialists. To the right of the entrance, near the hall of mourning, is a row of honor for renowned Jewish personalities from the spheres of culture, science and business. The equality of humankind in death is symbolized in Jewish cemeteries by unadorned tombstones of equal height; gravesites are not reused. Weissensee also grants the right to an eternal resting place, but assimilating Jews adopted the heavily adorned grave fashion common in German cemeteries of the Wilhelminian era. Therefore very elaborate tombstones are located next to traditional, simple headstones. The architecturally designed family vaults are of particularly superior quality. The cemetery survived the Second World War relatively undamaged and is one of the largest of its kind in Europe today.

Information

115,628 Berliner
The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery – Documentation of the Comprehensive Survey of the Burial Sites